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SYDNEY: Australia's former prime minister Kevin Rudd confessed that the bloody conflict in Afghanistan “scares the hell out of” him, newly leaked diplomatic cables revealed Friday.
Rudd, currently foreign minister, was revealed in confidential US diplomatic cables from Canberra to have confided his pessimism over the likely outcome of the conflict, in which 1,550 Australian troops are engaged.
Rudd also derided the contributions of Germany and France in Afghanistan in fighting Taliban insurgents, saying they were “organising folk dancing festivals” while Australians fought in restive Uruzgan province.
An October 2008 cable from the US embassy in Canberra reveals that Rudd told visiting US congressmen that “the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan”, Fairfax newspapers reported.
Australian officials have repeatedly stressed that progress is slowly being made in Afghanistan and that Australian forces were on track to hand over security in Uruzgan to Afghan forces within two to four years.
According to the cables given exclusively to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age by whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, Rudd said “he supported the Afghan war 'from day one' but confided that 'Afghanistan scares the hell out of me'.”On European allies in the war which has claimed 21 Australian lives, Rudd said there was “no common strategy for winning the war or winning the peace”.
“In the south-east, the US, Canada, British, Australia and Dutch were doing the 'hard stuff', while in the relatively peaceful north-west, the Germans and French were organising folk dancing festivals,” Rudd was quoted as saying.
Rudd's bleak assessment was supported by another cable sent to Washington which quotes Australia's special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ric Smith, as describing the “mission in Afghanistan and Afghan government presence as a 'wobbly three-legged stool'”.
Several cables criticise Australian efforts to use Australian Federal Police to train Afghan officers, the newspapers said, with one cable noting that training programmes were “hampered by illiteracy, corruption, drug addiction and insurgent penetration within the pool of trainees”.
